Blu-Ray Player windows 7

[solar_syd]

I finally want to make the move to Blu-Ray.
I mainly watch on PC screen (27in 120Hz samsung S27A950D)

Any recommendations

• internal blu-ray drive
• software

From what I read anyDVD HD seems a good investment.
bd rebuilder to shrink and imgburn to burn media.

However, what is a good software player?
Free if possible as i already spend on drive and anyDVD HD.

Thanks.

[Baldrick]

You can play blu-ray bdmv folders with free players like vlc, potplayer, mpchc. But no menus and you must use a ripper or background ripper like anydvdhd.

[fritzi93]

Any recommendations

• internal blu-ray drive
• software

Blu-Ray drive: Pioneer or LG, in that order. You didn't mention media. Verbatims are most often recommended.

Software:

You're good for ripping, re-encoding and burning with your list of AnyDVDHD, BDRB and Imgburn.

For playback, there is no freeware that can reliably navigate BD menus. Though when you buy your burner, you can probably find a retail version (for a little more) that includes PowerDVD.

There is another option: Rather than backing up a Blu-Ray disc to a blank, you could re-encode movie-only with BDRB and output to MKV container. MKV you can play from hard drive with any software player, such as those Baldrick mentioned.

[Dougster]

And avoid Nero Blu-Ray player. PowerDVD is far better.

[DB83]

The only problem with the OEM versions of PowerDVD that tend to ship with drives is that they are not kept up to date and might not play current disks. Cyberlink tend not to offer updates for these.

[solar_syd]

Thanks for the tips!

[fritzi93]

The only problem with the OEM versions of PowerDVD that tend to ship with drives is that they are not kept up to date and might not play current disks. Cyberlink tend not to offer updates for these.

Yeah, but it can be had as a bundled (crippled) version for essentially free. PowerDVD is no great shakes anyway, and IMO is not worth $50. Though by all accounts it's better than WinDVD or Nero.

The only really good Blu-Ray software player is TMT, but it's $100 and Arcsoft has ceased any further updates.

If the OP wants to save money, he could use DVDFabHDDecrypter (the free portion of DVDFab). It's not updated as quickly as the pay version. Or use DVDFabPasskey (a driver-level decrypter like AnyDVDHD). After the trial expiration, it becomes the "Lite" version, and will supposedly still work "with all the software that Passkey for DVD and Passkey for Blu-ray works with. You are enabled to use these apps to play/copy/rip the unprotected DVD/Blu-ray discs" (quoted portion from the download page). I think in practice that means you could have "Lite" running in the background and extract main movie with, say, Clown_BD. Then run it through BDRB or whatever.

Personally, I despise menus and prefer to put main movie into MKV container for playback from my HTPC. If you use a constant quality setting of crf20 (I think that's the default in BDRB for MKV), the space savings are on average considerable. A couple 2 TB external hard drives can hold a helluva lot of MKVs so encoded.